Many popular books and articles that purport to explain how people, companies,
or ideas succeed highlight a few successes chosen to fit a particular narrative. We
investigate what effect these highly selected “success narratives” have on readers’
beliefs and decisions. We conducted a large, randomized, pre-registered experiment,
showing participants successful firms with founders that all either dropped out of
or graduated college, and asked them to make incentive-compatible bets on a new
firm. Despite acknowledging biases in the examples, participants’ decisions were very
strongly influenced by them. People shown dropout founders were 55 percentage points
more likely to bet on a dropout-founded company than people who were shown, graduate
founders.